(c) Copyright 2015 J. Chapman — All Rights Reserved
I stood up to stretch my legs, put my hands on my back, and leaned backward — one of the vertebrae in my back gave out a little pop. Suzanne was the next patient, my last for today, and I suppose I was ready. She was never particularly challenging, a typical case of the urban ennui and mild depression caused by too much time and not enough responsibilities. Suzanne was twenty-eight. I buzzed the intercom and summoned our office clerk to let her in.
“Suzanne,” I extended my hand and she shook it lightly, politely, averting her eyes, more demure than usual. I indicated the chair opposite my desk, with an open palm, and went around to sit on my side. Sometimes I sat in the chair next to my patients, and sometimes behind the desk. It depended on our mood, and whether or not I sensed I would need to take an authoritative or a reconciliatory pose. With Suzanne I was more the father figure, so it was behind the desk.
“So how have you been?” I asked with a comforting smile, confident in her usual answer.
“Oh, not so good doctor,” she answered, looking at some tchotchke on my desk. The usual answer.
I thought I could ferret out a bit more of descriptive answer. “How was your week though?” I nodded while asking.
“Oh, yesterday was terrible,” Suzanne answered. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to recover.”
“What happened?”
“Oh,” she continued, shifting her weight in the chair, “it was only nine o’clock in the morning, and already it was hot and sticky, so I thought that I would head for the beach. I rummaged around in my dresser for my swimming suit…”
I inhaled so as not to sigh; I didn’t need the usual complaint about how insecure she felt in her swimming suit.
“… it was down underneath everything else. I grabbed a T-shirt without sleeves, and put it on with the bottom of my suit, some jeans, and tennis shoes. I just had to get out of the Valley, you know?”
I nodded, but it looked like she needed me to show a little more interest for her to continue. “Yes, the Valley can be stifling in the summer,” I prodded her on.
She gave me half a smile and continued. “You know, partly I think it’s just that I’m tired of being around my apartment. It reminds me too much of Tom.” Tom was her recently dumped boyfriend. We had been over this a couple of sessions ago — it wasn’t exactly clear who dumped whom, but it was fairly evident that things weren’t meant to work out. Their sun signs were incompatible to begin with. Aquarius and Scorpio.
“Well, anyway, I arrived at the beach really early — it was nice since I easily found a free parking spot a few blocks from the sand. Before heading out to the sand I stopped for some coffee, you know, it was the usual morning beach crowd.”
I nodded.
“You know doctor, I really love the smell and freshness of the cool sea air. When I left the coffee shop, that’s the first thing I noticed. It’s hard to put into words; it must be the nano-concentration of salts from the ocean. Magnesium or something. I shuffled around in my bag for my sunglasses, and headed down the last block, past some really tacky jewelry stores, shops with kites and psychedelic T-shirts.”
“Yeah,” I concurred, “there’s a lot of schlocky stores down by the beach.” As my eyes focused out to the distance, I glimpsed in my imagination a blue green ocean, with small sparkles of white static.
“You know,” she continued, “the day started out just perfect. It was the perfect temperature along the walkway. Just absolutely perfect. I remember breathing deeply and smiling. The smell of the ocean removed half of my anxiety, almost immediately. Even that early though, the bike path was pretty busy: mostly inline skaters, with occasionally a person jogging. I took off my tennis shoes and socks and started to walk around.”
“What do you think that you were looking for?” I was trying to direct her into a bit more openness. The descriptions were interesting, but I wanted to hear more about what she was feeling.
“Oh, geesh doctor, I don’t know. It’s too early for me to be looking for a man again. I just liked walking along the sidewalk, the sand gritty under my feet. Of course, there were the usual couples holding hands and strolling along with their eyes to the sea, which made me melancholy. I saw a gentleman up ahead playing a clarinet, and his sweet sounds opened up a little bit of a rift in my heart.” She breathed in deeply, but instead of sighing reached down for her purse, opened it up, and took out a piece of gum.
I sat silent, doodling a little in my pad while she crunched up the wrapper paper and put it back into her purse.
“I went past a couple of street musicians, and then went inside one of these typical incense filled head shops… you know, bells and chimes, crystals, glass ornamental reflectors, oriental tchotchkes.” She paused, making eye contact with me again, looking for me to make some comment, but I just shrugged.
“Yeah,” she said, “just stuff, really. I don’t know. Something about it seems soothing though, besides the obvious nice sounds, smells, running water, la dee dah. Anyway, I had this sudden craving for chocolate.”
I pursed my lips slightly to suppress a smile; Suzanne and I had been over this several times, so by now we both knew that chocolate was her crutch for needing love. It had become an understanding between us, a way to communicate loneliness without actually saying it.
“I wandered back out to the beach path again, and the up ahead I saw a man sitting cross-legged on a woven rug, just wearing his underwear. I swear all he had on was underwear. Okay, maybe it was one of those Indian skirt sort of things. What are they called?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Um, a dhoti?”
She nodded. “Suddenly he locked into my eyes, I mean, shit, I tried to pull away, but he had his talons connected into me. His eyes were really striking: a deep gray, with flecks of hazel. I stopped directly in front of him, and pretty much surrendered to him. He said Hello, but I didn’t answer. Half of me wanted to punch him in the face for his phoniness, for his mooching a living from the tourists, but the other half of me was, well… not ‘curious’… I’m not sure what it was. Resigned maybe. Like I figured that this would have to happen to me some time in my life.”
As she was apparently going to go into great detail about this, I kept my mouth shut, and held my pen poised and still, waiting.
“When he asked me ‘How are you today?’ I could hear his heart say:”
I can feel your pain. Yes it is a form of sorrow. You have closed off to others because it is the only way to shut out the pain from yourself. Yes, there is lots of pain in the world. But you can be aware of the pain and share in the pain but still continue to do the right things.
“I told him that I wasn’t feeling so good. I surprised myself.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Well, it’s pretty unusual for me to admit this to a stranger. Present company excluded, of course.”
“Of course,” I replied. “So what other advice did the beach yogi give you?”
“Well, he said that he had his rough days, too, and asked me to sit down on the large velvet pillow that was in front of him. I hesitated though, and kept standing. He explained to me that it was sometimes difficult for him to maintain a balance in life, with the demands of the people he loved and his ideas for the future. His heart said:”
You disparage me because you feel that I freeload off of the public. But my life is no different than anyone else’s. I maintain a balance between the people who love me, and manage my soul to follow the narrow path that leads to the type of death that I can accept.
“After that, I sat down on the pillow, carefully removing my sandals off to the side, and I’m afraid I gave him a somewhat lame smile. I guess, doctor, that at least he would be an interesting diversion. I thought I might challenge him. I asked him what he did when he was alone, away from all the tourists and roller bladers? He told me that he usually moved power around, arranged for equity, created equalization between the warring spirits. At first I thought that he was pulling my leg, challenging me back with some sort of absurdity. But when I stared a little too long I realized that he was being dead serious.”
She looked at me for some kind of confirmation, something to justify her passing judgment upon a spiritualist. I pursed my lips and began slowly doodling again.
“He told me that a lot of the time he felt powerless to help those that are suffering, even though he still knew their pain. He said that he prayed a lot for people who were suffering. Then he said he was sometimes selfish in asking God to relieve other folks suffering, because indirectly he was really asking to relieve his own suffering. Don’t you think that’s a bit weird doctor?”
Rather than answer Suzanne, I turned her question around. “Does it bother you that you can’t help people who are suffering?”
“You know, I asked the yogi that. I don’t remember him answering me outright, but his heart said:”
No, frustration only comes from failing to complete your tasks to the best of your ability, combined with a failure to take responsibility for your problems. The powerless need to look in their hearts for more love. Social conditioning frustrates us with its boundaries that confine our heart.
I cleared my throat. I wasn’t sure that I wanted Suzanne to go off of the deep end yet by pushing social boundaries. I was about to suggest a leading question to make her reconsider the benefits of participating within the social norms. But she asked first.
“What do you feel is the worst suffering happening in the world right now?” I thought for a few moments, trying to separate out the common things that worry people from the tragedies that I had recently heard about. “What do you think?” I asked her back.
“Oh, I thought it would be something like people killing each other in the Middle East or tribal warfare in Africa. But the yogi told me that although murder and war cause a lot of suffering, it’s really quite small compared to most of the world’s problems. He said that famine and disease cause a lot more. Do you realize doctor that in the twenty minutes that we’ve been talking eighty people died in the world from starvation or disease?”
I wondered how she knew this, and then realized that the yogi must have told her. Rather than question her, I wrote down on my scratch pad 80 x 3 x 24 x 365, and then realized I’d never be able to figure it out in my head without a calculator. But I figured it was less than 100 x 100 x 300, which would be three million. Hmm, that seemed like it could be right.
“The yogi told me that sometimes he sat there all day, watching people walking and bicycling by, with their Rolex watches, their Minolta cameras, their Cannondale bicycles, and he wondered how he could convince all of these people, who took their wealth for granted, to somehow use their wealth in a manner that would feed his brothers in Tibet?”
I discreetly pulled my shirt sleeve down over my Movado watch.
“I suggested to him that he could put up a sign saying ‘Donate for Starving Tibetans’, or something like that. You know doctor, on hindsight I shouldn’t have suggested it, but it was just one of those things that popped out of my mouth. He said that if he did that, he might be able to collect a hundred dollars a day. Then, after a year, he could fly to Tibet, smuggle in the U.S. cash, and buy and hand out food that might feed all the people in the country for a day. Or he could use the money to pay for a thirty-second commercial on television.”
“Now there you go,” I said, deciding to be supportive, but still wondering where her whole conversation was going.
“Well, the point he brought up was that, well, in the first place people are tired of supporting charitable causes they see on television. Shoot, every day they do infomercials for starving Nigerians or something. After a while people get the impression that these charity outfits are nothing more than big cons, anyway. Basically collecting money and making a good living off of advertising other people’s sorrows. It’s kind of sickening, when you think about it.”
We were both quiet for a minute as we pondered the viewpoint. I started to open my mouth to say something but Suzanne started again.
“Then he said that he had even considered going to one of the City Council meetings, you know, one of those sessions that they broadcast on the public access cable station, where they let the audience stand up and speak into a microphone. He thought that maybe the City could pass a resolution to make Lhasa a sister city, and then set aside some money for a commission to study the miserable conditions there.”
“Oh,” I heard myself say, surprised that I was getting involved in the substance of the yogi’s argument, “I doubt that would accomplish anything. I’ve been to a couple of those meetings, and it’s basically just a bunch of people firing missives into the void.”
Suzanne smiled. “Yes, I’ve seen a few of those on TV. Everyone with an opinion on anything shows up to tell the world what they think. I guess, though, that the meetings allow people to blow off steam.”
I shrugged.
“Anyway, I was starting to get tired of chatting with the yogi, and I was just starting to get up to excuse myself when I heard his heart say:”
We create governments to relieve us from the painful decisions that we are afraid to assume the responsibility for ourselves. They allow us to improve our prosperity by ascribing decisions that would otherwise tarnish our own souls. We pay our representatives to assuage our own guilt.
We both sat quietly for half a minute. After a while I became aware again that I was in my office, my ears opening again so that I could hear the quiet ticking of my watch, my nose opening so that I could smell the mixture of Suzanne’s perfume and hair conditioner.
“Then the yogi suddenly stood up and yelled ‘it’s all about getting angry!’ Doctor, I was so embarrassed. A couple of people passing by turned their heads to see what was the commotion, and I remember thinking ‘Oh great, he’s going to make a scene.’ I also stood up, and then he slapped me! He actually slapped my face! Then, of course, we were surrounded by a circle of people.”
I pursed my lips and straightened up for a moment, and then regained some professional composure and relaxed a little, twisting my head a bit to the side and back again. “What were your feelings?” I asked Suzanne.
“Well, geesh, my brain was full with a hundred different thoughts. His slap didn’t actually hurt, he was rather meek, but I was really embarrassed, and I remember breaking out in a sweat. I couldn’t figure out what I had done to deserve being slapped. Then his heart said:”
Forgive me, but I need to speak with you longer. What I am about to say has less to do with you and more to do with the audience that we have attracted.
“So there you go. I guess that he slapped me because he felt that he needed a bigger audience. I was a little angry at being a pawn in whatever he was up to, but at the same time I had some sympathy for the guy. So I just stood there.”
“Were you angry at him?” I inquired.
Suzanne thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so; I pretty much felt just resigned to the situation. I figured that, hey, this guy was just angry at our wealth, as compared to the suffering of his friends. Besides, he was puny enough that if I really needed to I was pretty sure that I could defend myself. It wasn’t really clear to me if I could help him directly, but I guessed that if he just needed some kind of pulpit to work out his anger that it would be okay with me. You know what I did doctor, this is really funny — I inhaled deeply and counted to ten.”
I nodded my approval. We sat quiet for a few seconds, the sound of somebody closing an outside office door punctuating the silence. I cleared my throat, but I didn’t have anything to say.
Suzanne continued. “After a half minute or so, after the crowd had sort of settled in, the yogi started singing. It was surprising at first; it wasn’t what I had expected. He was singing some John Lennon song in a plain and simple voice without any music, you know ‘I’m just watching the wheels go round and round, how I love to watch them roll… no longer riding on the merry-go-round, I just had to let it go’, just the words. Well, at first I didn’t recognize it either. When he finished, the crowd around us was still quiet. I guess we were all struck by the strangeness of his appearance, in his dhoti, with what he was actually singing. And there was a certain deja-vu experience to the whole thing, but not just for me. I could tell looking at the other folks standing around, that we all shared that this had happened to us before, or that we were imagining this and it was still to happen.”
“Well yes,” I replied, “it does seem like a rather unusual situation. Sometimes it is the oddity of a situation that gives it that deja-vu kind of effect. Not this situation itself, but the fact that, due to it being unusual, we are going to talk about it in the future with our friends, and thinking about how we will recount the situation is what really constitutes that prescient feeling. Kind of like your discussing it with me now.”
Suzanne gave me a tight-lipped look, as if to say “okay doctor, you’re being too clinical.” She continued with her story. “After he stopped singing, he reached down and pressed a button on a cassette player. I hadn’t even seen it sitting there before, but it was partly hidden under his rug and next to some cloth bag. The music came on, with a strong but interesting and foreign beat, almost an Indian sound to it, although it had more modern instruments. The yogi started dancing, just in his little dhoti, and my face turned red in embarrassment. It wasn’t that he was inviting me to dance with him, it was just that I was the closest to him in and sharing the center of the circle of the audience, so I felt rather immensely put upon.”
She looked at me for some advice, but I just shrugged.
“Anyway, when he finished his dancing, he reached down to turn off the cassette, and then he began to speak, more new-age mumbo-jumbo, like ‘Our future causes our present. We are here because our future requires it.’ Something else about him being some kind of conduit to the future to become more in touch with our awareness of the now. I don’t know doctor, it was too weird, but in a way it kind of made sense, but more at a gut level than anything I could describe in words. His heart said”
The difference between your love of the present and your desires for entertainment mirror your wishes to avoid thinking, to avoid confronting the pain and suffering in the world.
I raised my eyebrows. I could just subliminally hear the ticking of my watch again.
“It was very strange,” Suzanne said. “We all became rather quiet. We were suddenly just a group of people standing on the beach, waves crashing in the background, occasionally a pair of seagulls flitting by. You know doctor, it got me to thinking. How do you know when the world is on the verge of changing? Can a man preaching to a small coincidental group of strangers make a difference in the world? Is it nothing more than making us aware of what we already sense is really happening?”
I cleared my throat again, although this time I definitely had something to add. “Was the yogi contriving any psychics? You know, hypnotism, incantations… were there any spiritual shenanigans?”
Suzanne thought reflectively for a moment. “Well, you know, I suppose he could have been. I’m not sure how a person could just go out on a limb like that anyway, and not worry about other people calling him crazy. It was almost like he had a guardian angel somewhere in his future helping him.”
“Well yes,” I added in, “it does seem like a rather peculiar way to try to change the world. I mean, after all, he could probably reach more people if he wrote a book or a magazine article.”
“Or he could befriend some famous rock star to do some kind of charity concert for him,” Suzanne added.
——–
Then the yogi began to speak again. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time and for your listening. By the powers in me I promise you all good health and happiness always.” He pulled out a colorful satchel and held it open, collecting loose change and a couple of dollar bills, always bowing after each donation. The crowd began to thin, and after a couple of minutes it was just the yogi and me standing there.
“So what was that all about?” I asked him.
“I am sorry,” he said. “There are times when I am hungry, when my survival instincts overcome my sensitivities and righteousness. Then I suddenly sink to the level where most men live all the time. Then I sell promises and manipulate impressions. Afterwards it makes me frustrated and very disgusted with myself. Again, I am sorry.”
I felt a curious mixture of anger and pity. At the same time, I once again had that strange connection to a future. Not deja-vu, but more that somebody, somewhere, in the future was using us here in this event to achieve something greater. The yogi was looking to me for a reaction.
“Um,” I stammered, trying to remember what he had said. Something about promises and manipulations. “I guess that people make promises to please somebody that they think is their boss, and then have to manage impressions afterward to live up to their promises.” I didn’t feel right saying it, and it didn’t seem quite like the truth, but he was expecting some kind of confirmation from me.
“Well,” he motioned for me to sit down with him, and at the same time seemed to magically produce a small teapot with two cups. “You’re partly correct, but it’s a bit of a bigger picture.” He poured the two cups, and offered me one. I sat down and accepted his tea. “Employment is behind a lot of the politics in the world,” he crossed his legs into a lotus position, “but it is only a subset, a reflection really, of a larger sociological phenomenon of how people interact as people.” He took a silent sip from his cup. “You see…”
I interrupted him: “so you’re saying that because the United States is a large employer and the home of large corporate behemoths, we basically step on everybody else.”
“Let me finish,” he continued. “No, it has nothing to do with any particular country. Employment is the battle by an individual to obtain social acceptance within his society. And yet, part of maintaining that methodology of social support, the web of acceptance, is the perpetuation of employment opportunities. In other words, once employed, the way to stay employed is to view employment of other people as a positive goal. What happens is that sometimes, in larger contexts, what people do to maintain the employment web is not necessarily in the best interests of society as a whole. It may seem like it on the microcosm scale, the people you know, and especially the people that you work with. But many times it impedes ideas that would benefit society at the cost of reducing employment. In other words, even if an idea is great, if it would leave lots of folks unemployed then the idea gets killed. Take the cancer war, for example.”
“My mom died of cancer,” I added, I’m not sure why. I blushed when I said it; I was looking for his approval or sympathy. He gave a brief nod of acknowledgement and continued.
“I spoke to a man out here on the beach once, a scientist, who had found a cure for lung cancer. I can’t say I could remember what it was… it wasn’t particularly simple. He was a biochemist working for a pharmaceutical research company, and I guess they had done some analyses of the genes that were activated when lung cells went malignant. Anyway, stopping malignancy meant interrupting the expression of several genes in the pathway, and they had already identified several target compounds that would have done the trick. But the company that employed him pulled the funding away from his lab, and he and his associates were fired. You see, lung cancer is a big business, both for research and for treatment. The aspect of keeping all of these people employed took precedence over preventing lung cancer. That’s just one example; believe me: things like this happen all the time, in all sorts of industries.”
I sipped my tea, and he finished his. We sat in silence for a long time.
He cleared his throat, sounding me out. I was straining to listen to his thoughts, but apparently he was checking something about me, whether I qualified for receiving whatever it was that he held behind his veil of his serenity. I took another sip of my tea, and found that I was at the bottom of my cup. I don’t know why, but I opened my purse and gave him two dollars. “For the tea,” I said, smiling meekly.
“As long as you weren’t tipping me for my pitiful dancing,” he smiled, placing my cup through a hole in his blanket into a basket he had hidden beneath. “You see, there is a line of action between progress and employment that allows both to occur simultaneously. There are things that we can do to keep plenty of people employed, and still improve global quality of life. But the devil is in the details. You see, most people only react to their local environment: they look around and say how can we improve this. So the key is to focus on other areas that we can improve locally, places where we can employ lots of smart people, and allow them to focus on these smaller but more difficult increments after they accomplish their worldly needs. But this actually requires a cultural change, an adjustment in tastes. Some of the Europeans and the Japanese are much further along in this. For example, they appreciate the added value to their lives from the efforts of artists, architects, philosophers.”
I was almost hesitant to interrupt, which was unusual for me. But I cleared my throat.
“Yes?” he inquired.
“Well, that’s fine, except the Europeans and Japanese aren’t any farther along in curing cancer than we are.”
He smiled. “On the microcosm picture, the story is different. People study for years to become marketable into an organization and professional culture. But they make this decision when they are young, based upon their expectations for the future. In effect, the love from the future determines their career decisions in the present. What we need is for those people who assist in that revelation to understand that, mechanistically, intellectually, and biologically speaking, the underlying molecular and genetic causes of cancer will be completely solved ten years from now. We no longer need young professionals delving deeply into the biochemistry and proteomics of cancer. The demand for biological expertise has already peaked. We need educators of young people to focus more on what will develop future citizens to be both greater appreciators and greater creators of the arts.”
——–
We sat quiet for a while more. I looked down at my watch… an hour had passed already, but as Suzanne was the last client for today I wasn’t in any rush to end her session. “So after all of that, how did you feel?” My asking was tired and meek, partly just force of habit.
“Well, my mind was tied into a bit of a knot. What he was saying sounded almost correct, but not quite. It sounded a lot like he had the cart before the horse. We sat quiet for a few moments, as we watched each other think. When I ran out of things on my mind, I got up to go. Then I had an afterthought, and asked him if he thought then that we should forget this whole war on cancer thing. He told me that really, all he was saying was that we always needed to keep in mind the larger common spiritual purpose, and get past our own selfish interests. I guess that I agree, overall, really. It’s just that I was completely burnt out.”
I nodded. After a couple of moments, Suzanne arose, sensing that she was done. I scurried to my feet, “thank you, I’ll see you again this same time next week,” and held the door open for her. After she left, I straightened up some papers, turned out the light, and walked out to the lobby. Instead of driving, it occurred to me that tonight it might be better to leave my car in the parking lot, so I stood outside of our building to catch a bus home.
I began thinking. Then, if we are locked into our own little lives within our own little cultures, what can we say, what can we offer, to those with a larger world perspective. What are our responsibilities to other souls? And even more than that, what is it that I’m to do as a therapist, not directly really, not by spending my own time and money in the world, but what is it that I can generate by a “rubber-band effect” — how would I shine my little light upon my patients’ minds so as to enlighten them to how they can make the world better? Should I explain to them that the major problem in the developed world is actually mental illness, that this underlies much of our incarceration problems, most of our nonfunctioning family problems? Is it right for me to take a therapist’s perspective and reveal to them the same understandings that drove me into my profession, or is this overly self-serving?
Maybe I should just relay to them the joy that comes from healing people — it doesn’t have to be mental healing necessarily, I could point out all the other ways that they could assist people who are suffering. Because that is what really drives both me and the Yogi spiritualist — the bottom line is that we have made a decision to help people in whatever manner we have best at our disposal. You are adept at growing a certain prized plant, and this is your gift to humankind. Or you understand all of the mechanics for creating safe and inexpensive shelter using the materials available in your vicinity. Of course, you could also just realize that in this modern and interlinked world that materials flow in a large complex web, and that to be an effective provider of shelter you need to learn a whole trade, indeed the linking of entire trades across continents. Maybe you realize that in a complex world you should choose one small task and specialize at achieving a very deep knowledge of that subject, and then avail yourself of others in the complex web that might benefit from your specialization.
Or perhaps, like the yogi, you recognize that modernity and technology allows the provisioning of our basic human needs to be met by the efforts of just a handful of people; that as a result the majority of folks have so much free time that they need to be either entertained or have their spiritual requirements administered to. So perhaps you specialize in assuaging people’s anger, or helping people find love, or maybe just doing something as simple as arranging for old folks to get visitors.
I straightened as, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the number 14 bus slowing, a block ahead. As it slowed at the stop, I reached into my pocket for some change, the doors swooshed open, and I got on board, dropping my coins in the token box. I sat in the middle, a few seats away from a bag lady, and a man a couple rows behind her swathed in flowing robes. As we caught each other’s eyes, he smiled.
Categories: Souls
Short Stories by J. Chapman 
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